A Complicated Kindness Summary Sheet

Core Mennonite Beliefs
* First and foremost: Christians
* Specific Mennonite philosophies
* Non violence
* No circumstances
* Mennonites are exempt from going to war
* Rejection of the world
* Should focus on heaven
* Things in real life are distractions
* Community
* Strong emphasis on doing charity and helping each other * Putting faith into action
* Actions reflect inner-self

Religious fundamentalism and the coming-of-age novel
* Coming of age
* The achievement of maturity
* Transition from childhood to adulthood * Fundamentalist religions have strict code for adult behavior * Coming-of-age novels set in fundamentalist communities often feature a protagonist who rebels against religious authority * Coming-of-age novels set in fundamentalist communities tend to end either with: * The protagonist coming to a more mature understanding of his/her religion OR * The protagonist rejecting his/her religion

Significance of the songs
* Rejection of Mennonite values
* Yet some songs have Christian themes
* Embracing of secular world
* Connection to other characters
* Tash
* Trudie
* Ray
* Travis
* Other young people

“You”
* Addressed to a specific reader
* Writing to her English teacher – Mr. Quiring

Nomi’s difficulty with language * “I’m pretty bad with uh . . . words” (Toews 268). * “I also only said half of what I meant and only half of that made any sense, which is, I admit, a generous appraisal of my communication skills” (Toews 130). * Often doesn’t say what’s on her mind

* Worries about what to say in between Travis’s songs
* Frequently trails off . . .
* Similar to her father
* Has difficulty with written assignments in English

* Father just as wordless as Nomi is, as devastated
* Disconnected with wider community
* Disconnected with the world she’s interested in

Words as connection to outside world
* Graffiti on trains
* Literature
* Nomi is very well read
* Tash has a city library card
* Music

* Gets little bits of outside world
* Have small library
* Banned to watch movies and television
* Older Mennonites have their mother tongue, different from English and French

* Instead of using mouth to communicate, she puts a cigarette in * Have thoughts but does not know how to express

Words as painful
* Nomi lacks the language to discuss her family’s tragedy * Adults do not explain

Portrayal of fundamentalist community
* Reflect on the novel’s portrayal of the Mennonite community * Negative aspects portrayed?
* Positive aspects portrayed?
* Charity
* Kindness of community members
* Will pray for Nomi
* Offer her Bible verses as comfort
* Ray

Nomi embraces/adapts certain Mennonite values
* “I may be a disappointment to Menno Simons but I would like him to know that I have carved, out of the raw material that he has provided, a new faith....

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...﻿a complicatedkindness
Setting:
Nomi lives in East Village (pg. 6)
It is more commonly known as the East Reserve in Manitoba
It was one of two pieces of land set aside by the Canadian government for the immigrant Mennonites coming from Russia
It's southernmost boundary is about 20 miles from the US border
Mennonites had been adjusted in Russia to life in the open steppes (grasslands, prairies of russia) and preferred the open prairies. This would explain why the mennonites chose to settle in the praries because they knew how to strike living water from level ground, how to build comfortable huts, and how to heat them, too, without a stick of wood; they also knew how to plant shelter belts for protection against the icy winds of the northern plains. It was very similar to their way of living in Russia
The prairies are basically the farming industries. It goes with a flashback that Nomi told about farmers being very important. The teacher pretends to be a professor but she was not allowed onto the heaven train, nor was Rockin' Rhonda, nor Slugger Sam. However, farmer Fred was allowed onto the train "because he had Jesus in her heart" (52)
Connecting Chapter 15-21:
This book reminded me a lot of mean girls too. It connected a lot to acceptance. I think that the Mennonite community that Nomi lives in that has very exact guidelines and rules and if you don’t follow them like everyone else you are not as easily accepted. Just like in the...

...“Fire and Rain” by James Taylor is a song mentioned in A ComplicatedKindness that Nomi can relate to easily. James Taylor was born March, 12th 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts, although he was mainly raised in North Carolina. By age 14, Taylor was writing songs, singing, and had learned to play the guitar and cello. In 1966, he moved to New York City to form a band with some of his friends and by the end of the year they were performing regularly at cafes. Unfortunately, while in New York, Taylor lost himself in drug abuse for a time, but would later lead to the inspiration of some of his songs, including “Fire and Rain”. After he was back on track with his life, he recorded a few demos and had them sent to Paul McCartney, whose label signed Taylor immediately. A few weeks later, he fell back into his old habits of drug abuse, and was hospitalized in Massachusetts. After his recovery, in 1970, Taylor released his single “Fire and Rain” which was inspired by his experiences with drug abuse, depression, the suicide of his friend Suzanne, and the institutional psychiatric treatments he received. (“James Taylor Biography”).
While Travis is playing this song for Nomi, she is thinking about herself and her family. Nomi can relate this song to her life, because just like Taylor, she has lost loved ones, her mother, (who likely committed suicide like Taylor’s friend mentioned in the song) and her sister, abuses drugs, and has no faith in life. The song...

...endings often find themselves once a story has begun and at a certain point there is little control the author has over their story's outcome. Would that were true, but the book's climax comes too little too late and the repercussions of it aren't dealt with to satisfaction.
Like many contemporary authors, Toews strives to imitate the styles of her pillard predeccessors. Salinger and Nabokov are referenced directly in the text and float around with a self-conscious awareness that is not quite stealing and not quite homage but rather something that wavers uncomfortably in the middle. Though A ComplicatedKindness would benefit from it, it's impossible to judge books as though they were in a vacuum. One must acknowledge the influences and relationships to other very similar works and then ask if it is done well enough to be considered separately. To put it plainly, A ComplicatedKindness is derivative, but it is derivation well-done....

...A ComplicatedKindness- Miriam Toews Catherine Arnold
I recently read a book called A ComplicatedKindness, by Miriam Toews. The protagonist is a teenage girl named Nomi. Nomi is growing up trapped in a small Mennonite community called East Village in the middle of nowhere, in Canada. All her life Nomi was told what to believe, with heavy emphasis on the belief that living dutifully and by the word of God in this life would guarantee salvation in the next. In Nomi’s town, you were either good or bad. There was no in between, no room for individuality or mistakes. Those who went through their life there quietly, going to church every Sunday and working at the local chicken slaughtering plant after graduation, were considered to be on their way up. Those were the people who at the end of a long, uneventful life, would be greeted happily by Jesus and live forever in his kingdom of glory. Those who broke out of the mould were doomed. Since non-conformists were clearly speeding down the highway to hell anyways, they were excommunicated from the church and forced to either leave the community or live without recognition from even their own family.
As Nomi’s older sister Natasha begins to question their faith, Nomi lives in perpetual terror that her sister is going to hell. Their father is a strong believer; the church is what glues his soul together. And although their...

...Miriam Toews’ second novel starts with a funny-sad zinger: “Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” and right away we’re hooked on our narrator’s mournful smarts. Laconic, restless, sixteen-year-old Naomi “Nomi” Nickel doesn’t fit in. Her mother and sister left town three years ago. Her Dad is adrift. Her best friend is in hospital with a mysterious disease. Her family home is starting to sprout broken windows.
The big picture is even worse: every functioning adult in Nomi’s hometown of East Village, Manitoba, is Mennonite. There are wall-to-wall Mennonites – “Mennos” – running everything, and not very successfully. East Village is a dump, a nasty pit stop with one foot prematurely in heaven, and the other bent on stamping out pleasure and giving the boot to smart kids.It is Nomi’s misfortune to be a thoughtful, honest, wild-child savant in a town that is a repressed, deceitful, ignorant hellhole.
Nomi tries to fend off creeping righteousness by using “drugs and my imagination.” She and her band of teen exiles drive around in pickup trucks, smoking dope, reading hipster novels, and listening to Lou Reed, dreaming of city people and city pleasures as distant as satellites. Sometimes they sit out on the flatlands and watch the distant lights of other, exhilirating places, before they have to return to their own brand of comic-tragic reality: “Main Street is as dead as ever. There’s a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing...

...4. Quotation/Summary | My thoughts |
In chapter six, Nomi creates a very vivid memory of watching two black Mennonite dresses “flying around like crazy birds way up in the sky”. As she watched them fly all the way to her grandmother’s yard where she was, she remained fascinated, calling that, “even the best thing that ever happened to her.” She then said goodbye to the fallen dress when the spectacular show ended, like a little child who didn’t know the difference between a dress and a person. Shortly after recalling that memory, she asks Travis to stop by her grandma’s place so she can search for the dress. I chose these two scenes to discuss why I found their significance confusing and how I interpreted it. | My first reaction to Nomi’s memory of the two flying black dresses was one of slight confusion, as I wondered why this memory would be of such importance to her. She spoke highly of watching the dresses, saying, “it was the best thing that ever happened to me…”. What was more perplexing was when she went back and searched for the other black dress that had landed on top of her grandmother’s barn, yet ended up disappointed when it wasn’t there. This is a different side of Nomi displayed here, as she usually tries to keep up a tough façade while speaking of the many depressing memories in her life. It caused me to think that she is perhaps in that stage of adolescence where we cling to the memories of our childhood and pursue a...

...It can be said that struggles bring people together and, at the same time, break them apart. When two people realize their life situations are quite similar are controlled by fundamentalism, they tend to stay close to one another for comfort and understanding, even though they share nothing in interest. However one will eventually attempt a change, to try and manipulate their circumstances for the better or to leave. The other is inevitably left alone and desolate. Although a complicatedkindness entwines many such consequences from social issues and other obstacles deep inside its storylines, it reveals its dominant theme in the conclusion: that love endures in the end. Love will make hardships tolerable, will bind people together in spirit if not in a physical sense, and will brighten the optimism in the heart.
Pain can be a deep scrape in the knee on the gravel, or a growing black rose at the base of the heart. In a sense, however, they differ by a lifetime; a wound eventually closes and smoothes out, whereas as time goes on, the depression tears the body from inside out, darkening the senses, draining the spirit. And through all that, the girl lives onwards, rarely thinking about the consequences of her divided family, about her failing grades, her abusive drug use, and even about herself.
Where did her mother go without any clothing or transportation out of town? Why did her sister, Tash, leave them? "I use drugs and imagination to...

...Passage Analysis: A ComplicatedKindness
“This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event. The only reason we’re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counselor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that’s rich, she said. That’s rich.”
This passage directly relates to the theme of coming of age in a repressive society, which the author consistently weaves through the story, by using diction and irony to tie the theme together. This passage appears at the beginning of the novel, which is highly relevant as it sets the tone for the rest of the story, while giving the reader insight into the main character. “My guidance counselor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her.” This is character revelation for Nomi, the protagonist; this reveals to the reader that she is a very sarcastic and cynical girl. One may also see that she has a dark sense of humour when she says “The only reason we’re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our...